Profile • Mrs Patrick Campbell (Beatrice Stella Tanner)
“Walk! Not bloody likely. I am going in a taxi.” This famous line from George Bernard Shaw‘s Pygmalion was first spoken by Mrs Patrick Campbell in the original production in 1914. At the time she was almost 50 years old and yet she was considered such a distinctive actress that she could make an audience believe in her youth.
Born in London of an English father and Italian mother, her first experience of acting was when she joined the Anomalies Dramatic Club and it was through this group that she acquired an agent. One of her early successes was as Paula in Arthur Wing Pinero‘s The Second Mrs Tanqueray.
She was well-known for her sharp wit and eccentricities – Shaw called her ‘perilously bewitching’ – and she went on to play Shakespeare and Ibsen, as well as the redoubtable Anastasia Rakonitz in a stage adaptation of G B Stern’s The Matriarch.
On one notable occasion in…
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
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